One of the women, Jackie Ndoro, has been convicted, and will be sentenced on September 6. The other woman has jumped bail, and the police are looking for her. The judge played to the gallery at the end of the trial:

Judge Barbara Mensah told Ndoro: ‘In my view this case crosses the custody threshold. It is a very serious matter. The case of neglect is so serious I have in mind a custodial sentence.’

If the judge gives Jackie Ndoro a custodial sentence, I’ll eat my hat. The convicted person is a woman, the neglected person only a man. If the carer had been a man, and the neglected person a woman, the likelihood of a custodial sentence would be far higher – and this case would already have made the national newspapers, TV and radio programmes. In the UK there are 80,000 men in prison, and 4,000 women. The government is planning to build more men’s prisons, and close down women’s prisons.

The only person who comes out of this story with any credit is Kevin Wilkinson, the manager of the home, who had the sense to install CCTV cameras to capture what was going on. You have to ask yourself how common such incidents are in care homes for the elderly.